Glowing Embers

Rev. Chris Jimmerson
December 9, 2018
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
austinuu.org

As we celebrate the holiday season, it is good to remember the origin of these traditions and rituals, why they still matter to us, and how they may ground us in wonder, awe, and mystery.

Call to Worship

“Determined Seed”
By Laura Wallace

As frozen earth holds the determined seed,
this sacred space holds our weariness, our worry,
our laughter and our celebration.

Let us bring seed and soul into the light of thought,
the warmth of community, and the hope of love.

Let us see together, hear together, love together.
Let us worship.

Reading

“One Small Face”
by Margaret Starkey

With mounds of greenery, the brightest ornaments, we bring high summer to our rooms, as if to spite the somberness of winter come.

In time of want, when life is boarding up against the next uncertain spring, we celebrate and give of what we have away.

All creatures bend to rules, even the stars constrained.

There is a blessed madness in the human need to go against the grain of cold and scarcity. We make a holiday, the rituals as varied as the hopes of humanity,

The reasons as obscure as ancient solar festivals, as clear as joy on one small face.

Sermon

Well, here we are, back in the church if not quite yet back in the sanctuary, after the church went dark for two weeks, literally, as the building contractors had to cut the electricity so they could install the new power system.

Last Sunday, we did our service over internet live steaming from our Senior Minister’s house.

That was fun, but your ministers, Meg and I, have missed getting to be with you in person, as have all of our church staff folks.

So, here we are, back in the building, but with the construction still ongoing and suddenly, (at least it seems sudden to me!) suddenly in the middle of the holiday season.

We do plan to be able give ourselves and each other a great big gift of being able to return to our newly expanded and renovated sanctuary at least in time for our Christmas pageant and Christmas Eve services.

Merry Christmas indeed! We hope!

I’d like to talk today about the history and origins of some of the Christmas rituals and traditions we will be observing here at the church, and for many of us, with our families and loved ones.

I will focus on Christmas traditions and practices because they are those that we have inherited most directly from both our Universalist and Unitarian forebearers.

I want to note though, that I found a listing of almost 40 different religious holiday observances from a variety of religions throughout the world that have been or will be observed between November 1 of this year and the middle of January 2019.

They include the Hindu Diwali festival of lights, as well as a number of other faiths that hold light festivals; Hanukka; Buddhists marking the day that the Buddha first experienced enlightenment; the Baha’i faith celebrating the birth of their founder; and the Zoroastrian faith observing the death of their founding prophet – just to name a very few.

Each of these have their own traditions and rich histories, and, like with Christmas traditions and rituals, whether or not one believes the religious stories associated with them literally or not, I believe they help carry forward cultural memory.

They convey understandings about the human condition and experience – indeed about what it means to be human. They carry forward a people’s values and priorities. They shape our relationships with one another and promote bonding and community building.

And knowing something of the history and origins of our holiday observances may help us better understand the cultural memories they are conveying and the deeper meaning behind why they remain important to us.

The rituals and traditions that we most commonly practice around Christmas here in the U.S. seem to have actually arisen from a variety, a sort of conglomeration, of sources.

We also seem to have melded practices with secular origins and traditions from non-Christian practices with the Christian religious story of the birth of Jesus.

Speaking of which, I love a meme that’s been going around that says, “Three wise women would have asked directions, arrived on time, helped deliver the baby, brought practical gifts, cleaned the stable, made a casserole and there would be peace on earth.”

I also love how one of our Unitarian Universalist Ministers at First UU Dallas, Aaron White, recently summarized in one paragraph the biblical story of Christmas and the life of Jesus. He writes:

“Jesus is born to an unwed, teenage woman of color. She, the child, and her husband cross national borders without documentation, … fleeing violence in their home country. The child grows up to be a homeless teacher who leads a radical movement of people that refuses the boundaries of creed, class, or role in society. He travels around giving a version of free healthcare to anyone who asks and feeds the poor without judgement. He preaches a love so radical, and an allegiance to relationship over power so compelling, that it becomes illegal. The most powerful military force in the world deems him a threat. He is then tortured and executed by the state … ”

Not quite the version I was taught at the little Southern Baptist church we went to when I was a child. Something to think about as our government lobs tear gas at women and children seeking asylum at our border.

Anyway, let’s talk about how we think some of our Christmas practices may have originated and including how they might have come to be associated with that Christian religious story of Jesus’ birth.

Putting up Christmas trees reflects ancient practices of a number of societies that would decorate with evergreen trees, wreaths and garlands to remind themselves that life would return during this time of year when cold winters could make the world seem lifeless and bleak except for the evergreens.

Because it was also the time of year for many societies when the days were short and there was far less sunlight, folks would often light candles on or near the evergreen elements they had brought into their homes. This is likely one of the places where our practices of lighting candles at Christmas, as well as decorating with Christmas lights originated.

I’m sure glad we have LED lights now. Placing lit candles on tree branches seems like a fire hazard to me.

It is thought that the Germans of the 16th century originated the Christmas Tree as we know it today. A popular play of the time about Adam and Eve had a prop called a “paradise tree” – a fir tree hung with apples to represent the Garden of Eden. Entranced by the paradise tree, Germans began bringing trees into their homes and decorating them.

The Christmas Tree became popularized in America and Britain when in 1832, Charles Follen, a Unitarian Minister who had come here from Germany, and his wife put up a festively decorated tree, and their fellow abolitionist Harriet Martineau wrote glowing about it in the magazine, Godey’s Lady’s Book.

In 1846, Queen Victoria and her German husband Prince Albert were sketched in the London newspaper standing around a Christmas tree with their children, which further popularized the practice both in Britain and in America.

Another of our traditions, Santa Claus, comes from several legends about a Bishop in fourth century Asia minor called St. Nicholas. Left a lot of money by his parents who died when he was young, he helped the poor and gave secret gifts to people who needed them, especially children. This is likely part of from where the tradition of giving gifts at Christmas comes.

In one of the legends, St. Nicholas helped the daughters of a very poor man who did not have enough money for a dowry so that they could be married according to customs of the time. St. Nicholas, so the legend says, secretly dropped a bag of gold down the chimney, and it fell into a stocking that had been hung by the fire to dry -likely the origin of both our current practices of hanging Christmas stockings and the idea of Santa Clause coming down the chimney to bring Christmas presents.

Over time, the stories and images about St. Nicholas blended with myths about a gift giving Father Christmas in England and Kris Kringle in the U.S., and eventually these all kind of got combined together to form the myths, stories and practices we now associate with Santa Claus.

So, how did these and other traditions get conflated the Christian story of Jesus’ birth get conflated, and how did we come to settle on December 25 as the date for it?

Well, the truth is we do not know for sure. In fact, Christians thought in around 200 A.D. that the birth had taken place on January 6, based upon calculations folks and done using events of Jesus’ life laid out in the New Testament. In fact, the modern Armenian, Russian and Greek Orthodox churches still celebrate it on this date.

I was not until the mid-fourth century that most Christians had moved the date to December 25. How and why that happened is still a matter of some debate, but here is the most common theory.

During this same time of year that many cultures decorated with evergreens, most of them also had celebrations and rituals centered around solstice, the shortest day of the year, but that also harbingers the eventual return of the sun and longer days.

Solstice falls on December 21 or 22 on our calendar, but in the Julian calendar of places like Syria and Egypt, it fell on December 25th and was celebrated as the Nativity of the Sun. It was observed with dramatic rituals where from within their shrines they would call out, “The Virgin has brought forth! The light is waxing!”. In Egypt, the new-born sun (that’s s-u-n) was even represented by the image of an infant.

In Scandinavia, they celebrated Yule starting December 2, igniting huge Yule logs that would burn for up to 12 days.

This time of year was also when wine and beer made during prior months was finally fermented and ready to start drinking – a fine tradition that many fine folks continue on Christmas even today.

The Romans celebrated Saturnalia, a time of drinking and general debauchery during which the social order would be reversed and peasants would party and demand that those who were their masters the rest of the year give them gifts, food and libations to avoid being the victims of pranks and great mischief.

As the theory goes, Christian church leaders kind of coopted these and other secular and pagan traditions and practices by placing Jesus’s birth on December 25, as a way to increase the chances that Christmas would get adapted through association with these existing rites.

After this, and down through the Middle Ages, the practice of the poor celebrating raucously in a drunken, Mardi Gras-like atmosphere and demanding sifts from the wealthy continued, but only on Christmas day and only after first attending church that morning.

Then, along came Robert Cromwell and the Puritans and spoiled the fun for everyone. They cancelled Christmas. Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity would have been incensed.

In fact, in the U.S., the Puritans even made it illegal to celebrate Christmas in the City of Boston.

Party animals our Puritan ancestors were not.

It was actually the Universalists and some Unitarians who later began to restore the practices that have become how we now celebrate Christmas, especially the focus on home, peace, family, gifts for children and charity (though both the gifts to children and charity could and can still be used to reinforce the social hierarchy).

So, that is a very abbreviated summary of at least some of the possible origins of Christmas traditions.

I said earlier, that whether or not we believe in the the story of Jesus’ birth and life in a literal way, these practices and traditions convey cultural memory, human truths in metaphorical ways.

Just in those that we have discussed today, a number of these human understandings emerge:

The cycle of birth, life, death and rebirth – the amazing, evergreen tenacity of life;
The magic and the creative potential of new life that a spark of the divine may manifest itself through anyone of us;
Moving between seasons and again the circular patterns of nature;
The values of generosity and charity, but also how these can be used to relieve social pressure and thus reinforce the existing social order;
The importance of staying connected with family and loved ones;
The power of ritual, communal bonding to hold societies together and support individuals even during challenging periods;
The need for balance between light and darkness;
And, finally, the ways in which we must prepare ourselves for moving through liminal times.

It strikes me that those last three hold powerful meaning and beauty for us as we move through changes and disruptions at our church during this holiday season.

Liminal times are those time periods when we are in transition, at a threshold, leaving one condition behind but not yet fully where we are going.

Like for some of the the societies we have discussed who were in the transition from the shortest days of sunlight to the eventual return of the sun, limited by the shortened days and the coldness of winter – no crops to plant or harvest yet – travel and other activities limited by the cold and weather – uncertain yet of when this all would change again, these liminal times are often times of uncertainty and mystery.

We are experiencing that here at the church. We have had to delay and reschedule activities due to the construction. We are worshiping in a temporary space, even as we dream of reclaiming a larger and more beautiful than ever sanctuary, where we hope to welcome many more from our area who might find a spiritual home here and join us on our religious journey.

I am moved that during this very time of the year, our church itself was in darkness for a while to literally create enough power to make something new and even greater possible.

That’s synchronicity.

I do not associate light with all that is good and darkness with that which is difficult. For one thing, 1 think there is racist cultural baggage inherent in such an association.

1 think, we need both. The seed needs darkness to germinate. The caterpillar goes into the cocoon before emerging anew as the butterfly. We need the night to sleep and restore ourselves.

Likewise, too much light will burn the crops in the field, deprive us of healthy sleep and disrupt nature’s necessary cycles.

For me, there is something mystical about this intermingling of light and darkness. This time of year, I love to sit at night with just the Christmas tree lights and fireplace on. There is something about that interplay between the darkness and the glowing but limited light that fills me with awe and wonder and binds my soul to those long ago ancestors we have been discussing today.

This Christmas Eve, after the sun has set, we will do a ritual in which we all hold candles, and then we will turn off the lights, and light one another’s candles until all of them are glowing, and sing Silent Night together. Again, that interplay creates such a powerful, mystical and spiritual communal experience for me.

I believe in the spiritual power of this religious community.

I believe we have the rituals and communal bonds that will move us with grace through this liminal time.

I believe we have the wisdom to value the interplay of light and darkness, knowing it is together that they bless us with amazing, evergreen tenacity and resilience.

I believe that as we move through this holiday season and beyond it together, we will rebirth ourselves again and again as a religious community – a First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin with all of the magic and creative potential of new life, manifesting the divine more and more in our world.

Well, here we are – happy, joyous, blessed holidays.

Amen.

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